Does Social Media Mean Better Running?

The sun sank toward the horizon, lighting the sky with a fantastic orange-pink, as I ran around San Diego’s Mission Bay. But I barely noticed. I was too busy gossiping. Or, more accurately, listening to the two women running beside me gossip, while I panted and puffed. ¶ “Are they still dating?” one woman asked. ¶ “It’s hard to tell, they say they’re broken up, but I always see them together,” said the other. ¶ “What do you think, Claire?” they asked. ¶ “I…don’t…know,” I managed to gasp. ¶ The two women were part of a running group I had recently joined and kept a pace that was faster than what I usually ran. I was hoping to break my previous PR in an upcoming half-marathon (1:51:36). So although I was struggling, I focused on the women’s chatter and made the effort to stay with them. As we rounded the final bend, I checked my watch. We’d covered five miles in 42:30—exactly the 8:30 pace for my tempo run.

The route to my fast new friends? Social media. I found the group I ran with that day through the Web site meetup.com and cemented my running-buddy relationship with my new pace-pushing friends by connecting with them on Facebook and Twitter. This would probably not have happened six years ago. Before Twitter was created and Facebook gained steam (both around 2006), the idea of meeting anyone online seemed creepy, and sharing information about your training program, upcoming races, or daily runs over the Internet would have seemed weird if not downright risky. But now I’ve met all of my current running partners through Web sites, I talk about my runs on Facebook, and I track the races and training schedules of my friends—and a few elite runners—on Twitter.

And I’m not alone. Social networking has become a viable part of many runners’ lives. The Web site dailymile.com has almost 750,000 members who share their runs, routes, and training goals with online friends. Every day, hundreds of runners post their last run’s time and distance on Twitter, using such hashtags as #running or #nikeplus. Garmin wearers have logged and shared more than 2.4 billion miles on connect.garmin.com, the company’s Web site. Runners create profiles with their race times and track their “rivals”—runners they might hope to beat at local races—on athlinks.com. They post “running inspiration” photos showing fit-looking runners with sayings like “because the farther I run, the bigger my smile” on Pinterest and use apps like Instagram. All of this online interaction makes us more organized, accountable, and motivated. But can sitting down to type on a computer—or tethering ourselves to a smartphone—really make us better runners?

A year ago, both my running and my social life were stuck in ruts. I had moved to a new city, San Diego, where I knew only three people, and was struggling to make friends outside my small office. At the same time, my running had reached a plateau. I was tracing the same five-mile route at the same pace four times a week, adding only a few extra slow miles over the weekend. My hopes of hitting a four-hour marathon looked dim.

At the suggestion of a friend, I browsed meetup.com, which helps strangers gather for almost any activity you can think of, and found San Diego Running. The group’s organizers listed runs in different parts of the city on every day of the week, so I picked a run along San Diego’s waterfront one night after work. I hadn’t run much with groups—particularly not groups of strangers—so I fretted over thoughts of not being able to keep up, not finding anyone to talk to, and being left to run alone.

Instead, I met a few women my age who were not only up for girl talk—something I sorely missed since leaving my old friends behind when I moved—but who ran just a bit faster than me, which pushed my pace. After running together at the organized group run, we easily found each other again on Facebook and then planned future outings. During my third meetup with the group, I galloped along with a woman who invited me to join her for a long run that weekend. Both of us lacking a pen or phone, she told me her name and said to look her up on Facebook. “Diana Black,” she called as she ran off to her car. “Think opposite of white.”

As I turned online acquaintances into real-life running buddies, my running slowly improved. I was more likely to follow through with a run after work when I had committed to an organized event, and I now had faster friends who encouraged me to keep up. When I wasn’t running with these friends, I was reading about their upcoming races and completed training runs every time I logged onto Facebook and Twitter, further pushing me to get out and run. In fact, I had signed up for my first marathon in 2007 in part because I’d seen my college roommate report on Facebook that she had recently completed one. Well, if she can do it, I’m sure I can, I thought.

After seeing how social media influenced my own running, I was curious about its effect on other people. So I went to the office of James Fowler, a medical genetics and political science professor at the University of California, San Diego. Fowler gained fame a few years ago for his research on how social networks influence our behavior—summarized in the wonderfully threatening New York Times Magazine headline “Are Your Friends Making You Fat?” (He also discovered the so-called “Colbert Bump,” the phenomenon in which Democratic candidates who appeared on The Colbert Report raked in 44 percent more in campaign donations for the first 30 days after they’d been on the show.)

Although Fowler has a troubling habit of calling running “jogging,” he confirmed that social media has a clear impact on our motivation to exercise. He said we are more likely to pick up good behaviors like exercising and eating better if we hear (or read) that our friends are doing it, or even our friends’ friends. And because social media makes us increasingly connected to our friends and friends’ friends, it magnifies their influence on what we do.

“What’s the best way to get someone to start running?” he asked me as we sat in his small office amid the marble maze that is the UC San Diego campus.

“Invite the person to do it with you?” I guessed.

“Exactly, make it social,” he said. “And of course our online social networks are just extensions of our real-world networks. Online social media has made it easier to stay in touch with friends and has made it easier to coordinate group activities like runs.”

Fowler’s research, and really a glimpse at almost anyone’s computer or smartphone, shows that online interaction isn’t just about sharing details of running, or any other hobby for that matter. For the past five or so years, there’s been a much larger social media trend afoot, involving elimination of privacy and increasingly living our lives in the public domain. For some runners, this means publicizing every little aspect of their training programs and interacting constantly with their online running friends. Bloggers, Twitter users, and other social-networking runners also say this public display of training increases their motivation and holds them accountable to their training goals. That’s true especially for a younger generation of runners who were raised with Facebook and Twitter; for them, creating a public running “persona” through social media isn’t weird at all. It’s just a normal part of life.

Since so many runners are now conversant on social media, and because running’s popularity continues to grow, it makes sense that a whole crop of social networks that cater to runners would begin to sprout. Four years ago, Ben Weiner started the Web site dailymile.com with his best friend from college, Kelly Korevec. Today their site has almost 750,000 members who post their workouts and running routes to connect with both real-life and online-only running friends. When I moved to San Diego, I looked at the site to find new trails and paths, but other runners use the site for much more. They connect, comment on each other’s workouts, provide encouragement and advice, and meet up with each other in person before races.

Running provides great fodder for social networking, Korevec says. It’s a daily (or almost daily) activity that can be reported on and is an easy source of bonding material. And that networking encourages runners to push themselves. “A lot of our friends and family don’t understand our reasons for running, why we get up early, or do marathons, but when you log on to dailymile, you have a community of people who understand,” he says. “It’s great to have that feedback that you’re doing the right thing and should stay on track.”

“We’ve seen people join the site to do their first 5-K but then worked up to doing an ultramarathon,” Weiner adds. “They see other people doing these things on the site, and it encourages them.”

Despite the age-based stereotypes of the “Facebook Generation,” not all social-networking runners are youngsters. Allen Leigh, a 77-year-old retiree, writes the blog oldmanrunning.org, one of the top 50 running blogs according to the ranking company Invesp. He also tweets (@NoInjuries) and uses Facebook. Leigh started blogging in 2004 because of what he called “an inherent desire to teach people,” and now logs his heart rate, the weather, and his pace after every run. “Once a person goes public with something, their ego is motivation to keep doing it,” Leigh says.

Nor is the urge to go public restricted to citizen runners. While elite runners often use their Twitter and Facebook accounts for scripted publicity, even someone as famous as Olympic marathoner Ryan Hall sometimes reveals seemingly intimate details. Hall started his Twitter feed (@ryanhall3) in April 2009, a month before he ran the Boston Marathon (where he finished third in 2:09:40) and now posts—often several times a day—about his workouts, his wife, his sponsors, and his favorite Bible passages. “Today was one of those days I wish I owned a punching bag. Rrrrr. Frustrated. Cleaned the whole house instead,” he wrote in September. “Eating a AB&J & yogurt in the dark stealth as not to wake the full house at the in-laws’. It reminds me of sneaking out to go toilet papering,” he tweeted one Christmas Eve.

In perhaps the most extreme example of the running-and-social-media mash-up, Peter Wilkinson, a senior digital news producer at CNN.com in London, tweeted updates during the 2009 London Marathon. Wilkinson’s tweets, which he typed out on a cell phone while he ran, were streamed on the CNN Web site and used to update stories about the race. Wilkinson swears typing didn’t slow him down, and he did manage to finish in 3:30:15. “There seemed to be quite a lot of interest in what I was tweeting, although people thought I was mad,” the Brit says. “But if it amused people, I was happy to do it.”

Some runners, however, worry about the potential of social networking to corrupt their sport. Jerry Lynch, Ph.D., a sports psychologist and coach who integrates Native American tradition and Eastern philosophies with western psychology, says he appreciates running for its simplicity and is hesitant to introduce social media or other distractions to it. While Lynch has a Web site for his coaching business, wayofchampions.com, he says computers’ addictive properties can mean runners spend too much time social-networking about running and not enough time actually running. “If I tell myself I’m going to run but then get involved on the computer, saying I’ll just answer a few e-mails, more things come up, I’m answering more e-mails, and before I know it I look at the clock and I’ve run out of time.”

Many runners use their sport as a disconnect from their daily life, and if you’re tweeting and blogging before and after every run, you risk never being able to step away from the chaos of the world, Lynch adds. “You disconnect from society when you’re running,” he says. “Most people don’t have enough alone time.”

There comes a time to put down the smartphone, says Bart Yasso, Runner’s World’s own chief running officer, a prolific user of Twitter himself (@BartYasso). “If you’re tweeting while you run, you aren’t running fast enough.”

In our increasingly always-connected society, alone time may be a thing of the past. But maybe that doesn’t matter so much if tweeting before a long run, posting your daily miles, status-updating an age-group award, and blogging a race recap really makes you more dedicated. The UC San Diego professor Fowler says social networking is actually just an extension of what you do face-to-face. His studies have found those people you actually know have the biggest impact on your behavior. So even if your best friend is on the other side of the country, seeing her marathon plans on Facebook will likely be a bigger motivator than watching a neighbor you’ve never spoken to run by your house every morning. That said, once you build close relationships in the virtual world, so-called strangers can influence your desire to train. And can even become friends in the “real” world.

A few months after that evening tempo run in San Diego’s Mission Bay, I lined up for my half-marathon. It was a hot June morning, and by mile 10 I was struggling and began losing hope for a PR. Then I heard someone say, “Excuse me, are you Claire?” I looked to my left and saw a middle-aged man I had never met before. At first, I was a little freaked out. But then I recognized him. He was a local runner I had talked to on Twitter about training for that race. He ran the next mile with me, offering encouragement. After a mile or so he said, “Okay, I’m going to fade back and look for another friend, so good luck and strong finish!” Bolstered by his words, I pushed myself and came in a minute under my PR. Once I got my phone, I felt compelled to tweet: “Finished the half-marathon just under my PR,” and thanked the man.